Cisco A2Q Bid Assurance Requirements

The Assessment to Quality (A2Q) process is a Cisco design review and deployment assessment initiative that identifies and solves solution issues before a deal gets booked. Cisco Customer Contact Business Unit (CCBU) requires that all new Unified CCX deals be submitted to the A2Q Contact Center team.

Please note the following requirements:

The Cisco A2Q process must be followed for every Unified CCX deployment.

Every Unified CCX deployment must use the Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool. The tool will either automatically bid assure a configuration or will flag that a manual bid assurance review is required.

Every Unified CCX configuration must be bid assured prior to making a final offer to a customer.

Sizing Tools

The Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool for Unified CCX and Cisco Unified IP IVR must be used to size Unified CCX and Cisco Unified IP IVR systems. Also, the Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool is the only approved tool and must be used to properly size the Unified CM server(s). Before sizing the servers, first familiarize yourself with the on-line Help and frequently asked questions (FAQs) of the tools before using them to size your systems.

Note

For deployments with more than 150 agent phones on MCS 7835 or MCS 7845, Cisco recommends that you deploy a minimum of two subscriber servers and a combined TFTP publisher. This agent phone limit is server platform dependent.

The following table shows the maximum number of agent and non-agent phones supported on different server platforms for a 2-server Unified CM cluster with the publisher as the backup subscriber.

Table 1 Maximum Number of Agent and Non-Agent Phones Supported for a 2-Server Unified CM Cluster on Different Platforms

Effect of Performance Criteria

Each performance criterion can have an effect on the performance of the Unified CCX or Cisco Unified IP IVR system. In general, the more Unified CCX or Cisco Unified IP IVR components that you install and the heavier the system usage, the higher the demand on the server. However, the performance criteria can also interact in various non-linear ways to affect performance. The Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool for Unified CCX and Cisco Unified IP IVR can help you see and evaluate the effects of performance criteria on the Unified CCX and Cisco Unified IP IVR server.

Impact of performance criteria on the Unified CM server(s)

Similarly, Unified CM system performance is influenced by many criteria such as:

Software release versions— Using the Cisco Unified Communications Sizing tool, make sure to select the Unified CM software version with which Unified CCX will be working.

Tracing levels— Unified CM CPU resource consumption varies depending on trace level enabled. Changing trace level from Default to Full on Unified CM can increase CPU consumption significantly under high loads. Changing tracing level from Default to No tracing can also decrease CPU consumption significantly at high loads (this configuration is not supported by Cisco TAC). CPU consumption due to default trace will vary based on load, Unified CM release, applications installed, call flow complexity, and so on.